A Feb. 22 WorldNetDaily article declares that its petition "calling on all controlling legal authorities to ensure that Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to serve as president" "has now been signed electronically by more than 250,000 different people – averaging nearly 3,000 new signups a day."

But how do we know for sure? As we've previously noted, the petition is very secretive -- WND offers no independent verificaction mechanism, nor is there any apparent mechanism to keep people from signing the petition more than once or from signing fictitious names. There's probably a fair number Mickey Mouses on that petition.

Indeed, if you click on the "Click to Sign Petition" button and don't fill in a name, you still advance to a page thanking you for signing the petition and trying to sell you some books.

It appears that the so-called petition operation is little more than a marketing scheme to glean email addresses for WND's mailing list.

Further, such a petition should ideally be limited to registered U.S. voters who are eligible to vote in federal elections -- but there's no evidence that WND screens for that, either.

So, WND: Provide evidence that you have, in fact, signed up "more than 250,000 different people" and detail the methods used to determine that all signatures are valid and non-duplicate -- or post the names so we all can see who signed it and count the valid signatures ourselves. Otherwise, there's no reason to trust this petition.